Every time I insert something in my phone output jack, the sound is muted and I have to go into alsamixer and turn up the volume on the Speaker lever.

I can see the reason this is so - when I'm listening in phones, I don't want the laptop speakers on - but my hardware does this for me automatically, and the Speaker lever goes to the phone jack when something is inserted there. The result of alsamixer doing this adjustment is that I have to open a terminal, type alsamixer, find the speaker lever and turn it up again, every time I insert something in the phone jack.

It is possible that the package containing alsamixer has been updated since I first had this problem, if an update was published at the same time as many other updates - I usually don't read through the list too carefully if it's long :P This works with the version currently in the software repository for Ubuntu 11.10, though, so that shouldn't pose a problem for people finding this question in the future.
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Tomas LyckenJan 11 '12 at 12:10

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Turns out this wasn't so successful anyway: when I do this, the speakers on my laptop aren't muted at all. So now I can plug in something in my phone jack without having to go to alsamixer and turn the volume back up, but instead I have sound from both phones and speaker... =(
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Tomas LyckenJan 14 '12 at 15:50